Michael Jurewitz and Brad Ellis' talks from Çingleton Deux now on video

While all of the presentation at Çingleton Deux were fantastic, among those that stood out and resonated with me were former Apple developer evangelist Michael Jurewitz's talk on App Store economics, and Pacific Helm designer Brad Ellis' talk on color. I was privileged to watch them both live at Ç2, and here's what I wrote at the time:

Michael Jurewitz, formerly an evangelist at Apple and currently a director at Black Pixel kicked things off with a look inside the App Store -- how to work with Apple and how to value your work. He explained that developers shouldn't see their relationship with Apple as one of equals, but likened it more to animal husbandry. One of the best things in the world for a developer is to get featured on the App Store and the way to increase your odds of that is to embrace iOS and OS X's newest features as quickly as possible in a way that delights users and brings value to the platform. He also, bluntly, told developers that while there are issues with the App Store -- like no trials or paid upgrades, sandboxing, Gate Keeper, etc. -- that they need to get used to it and deal with it, because that's the world they currently live in. He also told developers not to undercharge for that apps, and asked them if doubling their price would cost them less than half their user base, because if it does, it's ultimately more money. And an un-successful app is a dead app, for developers and users.

Jury, who just returned to work at Apple this week, just finished posting over a half-dozen articles on the subject of app pricing. All of them are well worth reading, and help round out the video, and can be found at his personal blog jury.me.

Brad Ellis of Pacific Helm talked about what it means to be a designer, both in terms of the different skill sets possessed by visual, product, interface, and other types of designers, and in terms of the perceptions towards designers and design in general. Using a flabbergastingly awesome Quartz Composer program, he then went through an example of using math to solve a design problem, namely a navigation bar that had to look great no matter the color or platform it's deployed on. Combining formulae for waited average to flip text color from black to white depending on the background with an explanation of blend modes, he explained how to avoid having him make fun of your desaturated interfaces by properly using color burn and linear burn.

Some of the other videos are already online, including Jason Snell, Serenity Caldwell, Glenn Fleishman, Marco Arment, and Molly Reed, with more to come. Ç1 videos are also available, including John Gruber and Dan Moren, among many, many others. (All of them shot and edited by the remarkable Thomas Unterberger.)

The hosts, Guy English, Luc Vandal, and Scott Morris have also announced the dates for this year's Ç3. You can find them, and all the videos via the link below.